There could be a caveat to that, however
Ever since Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves released nearly a month ago already, fans have been wondering how exactly the game is performing since we’ve gotten some mixed signals on that front.
This newest bit of data, however, does not potentially look so hot for Fatal Fury in terms of sales.
Circana (formerly the NPD Group) recently released their top game sales chart for the United States specifically in the month of April.
In the list, the only “new” title present was The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered where it sat at the number one spot.
That appears to show then Fatal Fury was not anywhere to be found in the top 20 games in the U.S. last month when its sales would be at the highest for launch.
There is one potential caveat to this, though, as SNK is not listed among the publishers that share digital sales data with Circana for these lists like Capcom, Bandai Namco and Warner Bros. do.
So it is possible City of the Wolves performed better digitally, and Circana doesn’t have the data for it.
April 2025 Top 20 Best-Selling Premium Games – U.S. (Dollar Sales, Physical and Digital from digital data sharing publishers, excludes add-on content)
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— Mat Piscatella (@matpiscatella.bsky.social) May 21, 2025 at 8:05 AM
If these rankings are wholly accurate, it doesn’t paint a strong picture for the game’s release after SNK put a lot of effort and money in marketing for the region in particular at places like WrestleMania and in Times Square.
For its direct competition, Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8 and Mortal Kombat 1 all charted in the top five of their respective release months for Circana.
We already saw that Fatal Fury also failed to chart on PlayStation’s top April downloaded games lists for North America and Europe, which may back up what we’re seeing here.
In its home country, City of the Wolves was in the top 10 in Japan, but it still only managed to sell less than 10,000 total physical copies at launch.
The only real potential bright spot we’ve seen thus far was that Fatal Fury was among Steam’s top 12 best sellers for April so that’s something to hold on to at least.
So we’ve gotten some mixed signals as to whether Fatal Fury’s big push to stage a comeback after 25 years has paid off though most of the data we’ve seen thus far outside of Steam isn’t looking super promising.
SNK poured so many resources into promoting City of the Wolves and potentially more than we’ve ever really seen for a fighting game before, so a softer launch would likely be viewed as disappointing for the company — but we of course don’t know what their internal predictions and forecasts were like.
This also comes after SNK’s CEO stepped down from his position at the company following the game’s release.
Without official word from SNK, we don’t truly know how Fatal Fury is selling in comparison to their expectations.
But even if City of the Wolves isn’t hitting as hard as they’d hoped, that doesn’t mean the game is going to disappear anytime soon.
The developers have pretty much already promised at least three seasons of content for Fatal Fury, so it should have years of support ahead of it for players who do seem to be enjoying the game quite a bit.
There’s also the massive SNK World Championship this year running a record-breaking $2.5 million prize pool for Fatal Fury as well as inclusion in the eSports World Cup, so the promotions will be ongoing too.